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SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
OF THE
VICTORIAN AGE
SOCIAL
TRANSFORMATIONS
OF THE VICTORIAN AGE
A SURVEY OF COURT AND COUNTRY
BY
T. H. S. ESCOTT
Author of ‘England, its People, Polity and Pursuits,’
&c., &c.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
153-157 FIFTH AVENUE
1897
PREFACE
It may be well very briefly to explain the relation in which the presentwork stands to a survey, not a history, of modern England undertaken bythe same author some years ago. That earlier work was originally publishedby Messrs Cassell and Co. in two volumes. It was reprinted, first by them,secondly by Messrs Chapman and Hall, in a single volume. Into thatre-issue of his England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits (the labour ofrevision being much lightened by the obliging help of Mr FrancisDrummond), the author introduced certain references to social orlegislative changes effected since the original edition of the workappeared. Without organic disturbance of its plan, and risk of consequentconfusion to the reader, it would have been impossible to bring down thatbook to the year 1897. The writer does not in the[Pg vi] following pagespre-suppose any knowledge of his former book on the part of the readers ofhis present one. He has, however, held himself absolved from the duty ofrepeating in this book minute accounts of institutions fully described inits predecessor. Such repetition seemed the more undesirable because theearlier book is still in wide circulation here; while it has beentranslated into several European languages, and has been adopted as a textbook in the higher grade State schools of Germany,[1] and of othercountries. The method of workmanship adopted in Social Transformations ofthe Victorian Age is identical with that pursued in the case of England,Etc.
This new book being, like its predecessor, not a history, but a series ofdifferent views from a common standpoint, the sketches of national lifeand character as well as of national institutions at work, have in allcases been made from personal observation; supplemented[Pg vii] by the assistanceof the highest experts in their different departments to whom the writerhad access. Often, he is glad to say, the same private friends who helpedhim in the seventies have been able to renew that help in the nineties.Thus, Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Robert Herbert, Mr Mundella, Mr ArchibaldMilman of the House of Commons, and Mr